Administering and managing enterprise environments consumes time, money and resources. In many cases, this is because the application and data management process is decentralized and labor-intensive. For example, a significant portion of an administrator's time may be spent providing more storage or performing backups for the corporate data, or updating servers to handle growth in corporate data. Also, an administrator may need to create and provision new servers to handle the growth in data. Additionally, an administrator may spend time updating or provisioning a server to provide a particular user application. Additionally, a significant portion of corporate data may reside outside the corporate data center. For example, corporate documents, files and data may exist on or are distributed to various computers remote to the data center.
In an effort to reduce the time, money, and resources required to administer and manage corporate data and applications, many companies have consolidated and centralized servers, corporate data and applications. Although consolidation and centralization have reduced some costs and have produced some benefits, centralized data and applications introduce additional challenges in providing access to data and applications. One such challenge involves a remote user trying to access a file over a wide area network (WAN) connection. For example, a remote user at a branch office which typically has a network connection to the corporate data center that operates much slower than a LAN connection may try to open over the WAN a Microsoft Office document stored in at a corporate data center. The remote user's access over the network to the file may be delayed due to the latency, reliability and bandwidth with the WAN. The delays may be larger for larger files. Furthermore, as the distance between the remote user and the corporate data center grows, the frequency and length of network delays in accessing files also may increase. Adding virtual private network, security and other network layers on the WAN may further reduce bandwidth available to the remote users and increase delays in accessing the file. The lower speed and bandwidth of the remote office may cause unacceptable delays in accessing remote files. To avoid the delays in remote file access, remote users may copy and use files locally, defeating the purpose of centralized operations. Additionally, WAN connections may be less reliable than LAN connections, resulting in packet loss and network disconnection. WAN interruptions may occur during a file operation, such as saving or opening a document, further causing delays experienced by the remote user.
Therefore, systems and methods are desired to improve access by remote users to centralized applications and data files, including acceleration of the delivery of applications and data files to remote users.